Wednesday, January 31, 2007

You thought that it could never happento all the people that you became,your body lost in legend, the beast so very tame.But here, right here,between the birthmark and the stain,between the ocean and your open vein,between the snowman and the rain,once again, once again,love calls you by your name.The women in your scrapbookwhom you still praise and blame,you say they chained you to your fingernailsand you climb the halls of fame.Oh but here, right here,between the peanuts and the cage,between the darkness and the stage,between the hour and the age,once again, once again,love calls you by your name.

Shouldering your lonelinesslike a gun that you will not learn to aim,you stumble into this movie house,then you climb, you climb into the frame.Yes, and here, right herebetween the moonlight and the lane,between the tunnel and the train,between the victim and his stain,once again, once again,love calls you by your name.

I leave the lady meditatingon the very love which I, I do not wish to claim,I journey down the hundred steps,but the street is still the very same.And here, right here,between the dancer and his cane,between the sailboat and the drain,between the newsreel and your tiny pain,once again, once again,love calls you by your name.

Where are you, Judy, where are you, Anne?Where are the paths your heroes came?Wondering out loud as the bandage pulls away,was I, was I only limping, was I really lame?Oh here, come over here,between the windmill and the grain,between the sundial and the chain,between the traitor and her pain,once again, once again,love calls you by your name.

The rain falls down on last year's man,that's a jew's harp on the table,that's a crayon in his hand.And the corners of the blueprint are ruined since they rolledfar past the stems of thumbtacksthat still throw shadows on the wood.And the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mendand all the rain falls down amenon the works of last year's man.I met a lady, she was playing with her soldiers in the darkoh one by one she had to tell themthat her name was Joan of Arc.I was in that army, yes I stayed a little while;I want to thank you, Joan of Arc,for treating me so well.And though I wear a uniform I was not born to fight;all these wounded boys you lie beside,goodnight, my friends, goodnight.

I came upon a wedding that old families had contrived;Bethlehem the bridegroom,Babylon the bride.Great Babylon was naked, oh she stood there trembling for me,and Bethlehem inflamed us bothlike the shy one at some orgy.And when we fell together all our flesh was like a veilthat I had to draw aside to seethe serpent eat its tail.

Some women wait for Jesus, and some women wait for Cainso I hang upon my altarand I hoist my axe again.And I take the one who finds me back to where it all beganwhen Jesus was the honeymoonand Cain was just the man.And we read from pleasant Bibles that are bound in blood and skinthat the wilderness is gatheringall its children back again.

The rain falls down on last year's man,an hour has gone byand he has not moved his hand.But everything will happen if he only gives the word;the lovers will rise upand the mountains touch the ground.But the skylight is like skin for a drum I'll never mendand all the rain falls down amenon the works of last year's man.

It's true that all the men you knew were dealerswho said they were through with dealingEvery time you gave them shelterI know that kind of manIt's hard to hold the hand of anyonewho is reaching for the sky just to surrender,who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behindyou find he did not leave you very muchnot even laughterLike any dealer he was watching for the cardthat is so high and wildhe'll never need to deal anotherHe was just some Joseph looking for a mangerHe was just some Joseph looking for a manger

And then leaning on your window sillhe'll say one day you caused his willto weaken with your love and warmth and shelterAnd then taking from his walletan old schedule of trains, he'll sayI told you when I came I was a strangerI told you when I came I was a stranger.

But now another stranger seemsto want you to ignore his dreamsas though they were the burden of some otherO you've seen that man beforehis golden arm dispatching cardsbut now it's rusted from the elbows to the fingerAnd he wants to trade the game he plays for shelterYes he wants to trade the game he knows for shelter.

Ah you hate to see another tired manlay down his handlike he was giving up the holy game of pokerAnd while he talks his dreams to sleepyou notice there's a highwaythat is curling up like smoke above his shoulder.It is curling just like smoke above his shoulder.

You tell him to come in sit downbut something makes you turn aroundThe door is open you can't close your shelterYou try the handle of the roadIt opens do not be afraidIt's you my love, you who are the strangerIt's you my love, you who are the stranger.

Well, I've been waiting, I was surewe'd meet between the trains we're waiting forI think it's time to board anotherPlease understand, I never had a secret chartto get me to the heart of thisor any other matterWhen he talks like thisyou don't know what he's afterWhen he speaks like this,you don't know what he's after.

Let's meet tomorrow if you chooseupon the shore, beneath the bridgethat they are building on some endless riverThen he leaves the platformfor the sleeping car that's warmYou realize, he's only advertising one more shelterAnd it comes to you, he never was a strangerAnd you say ok the bridge or someplace later.

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.Here's yesterday, last year ---Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vastWindless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stirThough nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.The inhabitants are light as cork,Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.Never trespassing in bad temper:Stalling in midair,Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This familyOf valentine faces might please a collector:They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circleAbout a bald hospital saucer.It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paperAnd appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a pictureShe has one too many dimensions to enter.Grief and anger, exorcised,Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagullTattling in its cat-voice of departure.Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,Crawls up out of the sea.

She was all in black but for a yellow pony tailthat trailed from her cap, and bright blue glovesthat she held out wide, the feathery fingers spread,as surely she stepped, click-clack, onto the frozentop of the world. And there, with a clatter of blades,she began to braid a loose path that broadenedinto a meadow of curls. Across the ice she swoopedand then turned back and, halfway, bent her legsand leapt into the air the way a crane leaps, blue gloveslifting her lightly, and turned a snappy half-turnthere in the wind before coming down, arms wide,skating backward right out of that moment, smiling backat the woman she'd been just an instant before.

"There's never an end to dustand dusting," my aunt would sayas her rag, like a thunderhead,scudded across the yellow oakof her little house. There she livedseventy years with a ballof compulsion closed in her fist,and an elbow that creaked and poppedlike a branch in a storm. Now dustis her hands and dust her heart.There's never an end to it.

Biography

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known.

After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

This autobiography/biography was first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

THE angels are stoopingAbove your bed;They weary of troopingWith the whimpering dead.God's laughing in HeavenTo see you so good;The Sailing SevenAre gay with His mood.I sigh that kiss you,For I must ownThat I shall miss youWhen you have grown.

COME, I will make the continent indissoluble;I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;I will make divine magnetic lands,With the love of comrades,With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers ofAmerica, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all overthe prairies;I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other'snecks;By the love of comrades,By the manly love of comrades.

For you these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme! 10For you! for you, I am trilling these songs,In the love of comrades,In the high-towering love of comrades.

Today, from a distance, I saw youwalking away, and without a soundthe glittering face of a glacierslid into the sea. An ancient oakfell in the Cumberlands, holding onlya handful of leaves, and an old womanscattering corn to her chickens looked upfor an instant. At the other sideof the galaxy, a star thirty-five timesthe size of our own sun explodedand vanished, leaving a small green spoton the astronomer's retinaas he stood on the great open domeof my heart with no one to tell.

Just past dawn, the sun standswith its heavy red headin a black stanchion of trees,waiting for someone to comewith his bucketfor the foamy white light,and then a long day in the pasture.I too spend my days grazing,feasting on every green momenttill darkness calls,and with the othersI walk away into the night,swinging the little tin bellof my name.

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.Five billion miles away, a galaxy dieslike a snowflake falling on water. Below us,some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barnback into the little system of his care.All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser is one of Nebraska’s most highly regarded poets and served as the United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004 - 2006. A professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he is the author of eleven full-length collections of poetry, including Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004) and Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994). Over the years his works have appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. Koosers’ poems are included in textbooks and anthologies used in both secondary schools and college classrooms across the country. He has received two NEA fellowships in poetry, the Pushcart Prize, the Stanley Kunitz Prize, The James Boatwright Prize, and a Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council.

Kooser has read his poetry for The Academy of American Poets in New York City as well as for many university audiences including those of the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell at Ithaca, Case Western Reserve at Cleveland, The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He has conducted writing workshops in connection with many of these readings.

In addition to poetry, Kooser has written in a variety of forms including plays, fiction, personal essays, and literary criticism. His first book of prose, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and Third Place in the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award in Nonfiction for 2002. The book was chosen as the Best Book Written by a Midwestern Writer for 2002 by Friends of American Writers. It also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards. The University of Nebraska Press will publish his newest book The Poetry Home Repair Manual in January 2005. The book will give beginning poets tips for their writing.

Currently he is editor and publisher of Windflower Press which specializes in the publication of contemporary poetry. Though mostly inactive now, Windflower published a number of books as well as two literary magazines, The Salt Creek Reader (1967-1975) and The Blue Hotel (1980-1981). The Salt Creek Reader was awarded several grants of support from the National Endowment of the Arts through The Coordination Council of Literary Magazines. Kooser published several anthologies through Windflower Press. One of these, The Windflower Home Almanac of Poetry, was listed by Library Journal as one of the best books from small presses for 1980. Seventeen Danish Poets in Translation received international notice, and As Far As I Can See; Contemporary Writing of the Middle Plains is in use as a text in secondary schools and colleges across the plains region. In 1999, Kooser published Roy Scheele's Keeping the Horses as a fundraising project for the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association.

Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1939, Kooser earned a BS at Iowa State University in 1962 and an MA at the University of Nebraska in 1968. He is a former vice-president of the Lincoln Benefit Life, where he worked as an insurance representative for many years. He lives on an acreage near the town of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife, Kathleen Rutledge, and dogs, Alice and Howard. He also has a son, Jeff, and a granddaughter, Margare

What once was meant to be a statement—a dripping dagger held in the fistof a shuddering heart—is now just a bruiseon a bony old shoulder, the spotwhere vanity once punched him hardand the ache lingered on. He looks likesomeone you had to reckon with,strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,but on this chilly morning, as he walksbetween the tables at a yard salewith the sleeves of his tight black T-shirtrolled up to show us who he was,he is only another old man, picking upbroken tools and putting them back,his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

Today you would be ninety-sevenif you had lived, and we would all bemiserable, you and your children,driving from clinic to clinic,an ancient fearful hypochondriacand his fretful son and daughter,asking directions, trying to readthe complicated, fading map of cures.But with your dignity intactyou have been gone for twenty years,and I am glad for all of us, althoughI miss you every day—the heartbeatunder your necktie, the hand cuppedon the back of my neck, Old Spicein the air, your voice delighted with stories.On this day each year you loved to relatethat the moment of your birthyour mother glanced out the windowand saw lilacs in bloom. Well, todaylilacs are blooming in side yardsall over Iowa, still welcoming you.